Help:Common mistakes

Contents

Here are some mistakes people commonly make on a wikia. Please try to avoid these!

Confusion about ownership

One of the great things about wikias are that they're communities of like-minded fans, where everyone has a hand in making decisions as a group. To that end, no single user owns a wikia, and that includes founders and administrators. Wikias are owned by their communities, and everyone is welcome to edit and contribute.

Protecting pages unnecessarily

The majority of pages on all wikias should remain publicly editable, and are not to be protected. Pages may, however, be temporarily or permanently protected in cases of persistent vandalism or edit warring.

Applying too many policies

It's not a good idea to try to enforce a lot of policies on a new and small community. Bigger wikias often have more and bigger policies because of their experiences, and those policies were specifically tailored to the needs of their communities. But on a brand new wikia, you won't always know how your community will evolve. Start with a few basic editing guidelines so people know how pages should be written, and create a few basic behavioral guidelines, but don't go too far beyond that. Let your community evolve naturally, and you'll discover what policies are best suited to your wikia.

Deleting content

Deleting useful content.

A page may be written poorly, yet still have a purpose. Consider what a sentence or paragraph tries to say. Clarify it instead of throwing it away. If the material seems wrongly categorized, or out of place, consider moving the wayward material to another page, or creating a new page for it. If you need to remove potentially useful content, it is usually best to move it to the discussion page. The author of the text once thought it valuable, so it is polite to preserve it for later discussion.

Deleting without announcing that you're doing it.

Remark on it in the edit summary box. Otherwise, other users who care about the page's development will be caught unaware, and may think you're being intentionally sneaky.

Deleting without justifying.

Deleting anything nontrivial requires some words of justification in the edit summary or on the discussion page.

Deleting redirects.

If a page has been moved to a new title, an automatic redirect will be left from the old title to the new one. You should usually leave the redirect in place so people who have bookmarked or linked to the old title can easily find the new one.

Taking it too seriously

Wikias work through the collaboration of reasonable and consensus-oriented people. Flaming people and being rude is rarely acceptable on a wikia.

Don't get annoyed if you find some bad articles. Wikias are works in progress; please tolerate our imperfection, and help us improve. There are a lot of smart people editing Wikia communities, and everyone finds they have something to contribute. The best response to a bad page is to fix it!